Month: April 2014

During the MARAC plenary today, Kathleen Roe of the New York State Archives gave a rousing call for more advocacy by archivists for their profession to those external stakeholders who don’t necessarily know what we do but upon whom we rely for funding. It was an inspiring speech that had a number of us fired up to go back to our home institutions and to do more to advocate (with fire being a theme throughout her speech).

But if you look back over the past couple of years, plenary speakers have been exhorting us to get involved with advocacy left and right. Rand Jimerson challenged MARAC to be advocates for ourselves, our collections, and the stories of the subaltern found in those collections just three years ago. The year after, MARAC had an entire conference dedicated to advocacy where Christy Coleman charged us again to advocate to politicians, stakeholders, board members, and beyond. The Council of State Archivists has published “The Importance of State Archives,” a document that gives examples and talking points that can be used by many kinds of archival repositories. A google search for archival advocacy gives you thousands of hits, and shows that this is not just a new topic, but it is one that has been talked about more and more in the past few years.

Roe and others during her plenary talked about archivists needing to ask for what they are worth in salary, benefits, and from their schools, and rightly so. At the same time, archival institutions should ask for what they deserve from funding sources, politicians, other government agencies, and beyond. Too often archives are willing to accept the status quo or accept what their funding sources are willing to give them because they don’t think that they would be able to affect any change. Then, when situations like what happened to the Georgia State Archives occur or when massive cuts are on the table, our advocacy furor is shaken up and we finally start taking action. But when a situation is that dire, it is too late for grassroots campaigns to do much of anything. So please, conference program committees: continue to beat us over the head with advocating for ourselves, our institutions, and are usefulness until we start to get it and start to take it to heart. We need it, and won’t get there unless you continue to push us.

Accessing information about government no longer has to mean going to a building and requesting permission to sift through paper documents. It doesn’t even have to mean writing a letter, filling out a complex form, or trying to figure out who to contact about public records or how to access records in the first place.

Government transparency is a good thing, and so I am happy to see the proliferation of open government data repositories, like data.gov and its equivalents at the state level. One worry, however, that I have is that it does not seem that libraries and archives are involved in creating, managing, disseminating, or describing this information. Most of these projects come out of such locations as state’s IT agency, or the budget department, or some other administrative actor. I will admit that I have not looked at all of the open government data repositories out there, so there may be libraries and archives involved in some of them. But this is the kind of data that has traditionally been provided by libraries and archives, and now it is being taken out of our hands and being served elsewhere.

When I initially sat down to write this post, I was ready to be full of angst about the state of archives in our society, and that our roles were being taken over by IT departments and computers. But open data repositories generally deal with data that is machine-readable, and usually machine-created. On the other hand, we archivists have an explosion of digital data to deal with, the natural extension of the explosion of paper records during the middle of the 20th century; emails, word documents, excel spreadsheets, websites, blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook, and more still defy easy manipulation by computers and easy aggregation into data repositories. One could argue that by taking the burden of providing these datasets that are easily described in the aggregate, archivists are thereby allowed to concentrate on records that cannot be described so easily or automatically. In addition, many of these datasets are provided in machine-readable format, which obviously leads itself to be described by machines rather than archivists. One of the things at which archivists excel at is taking a large mass of data that is difficult or impossible to describe automatically and providing access to it to researchers. But there is always an existential pang in my soul when a record previously provided by archives moves elsewhere.

So what do you think? Does it matter? Am I being an open government hipster, saying that libraries and archives were into open data before it was cool? Or should we cheer the move of these types of records to a different sector?